We all know about the ASUS Eee PC. That awesome mini laptop that Taiwanese giant ASUS created targeting students and novice computer users. It was a very good effort. They've managed to sell over 1 million units in less than six months.

Of course, ASUS wasn't going to lounge around watching their sales go up. They took it a step further and released the NEW Asus Eee PC 900.

The normal ASUS Eee PC was heavily criticised for certain issues, especially the 7in screen, which was too small to view webpages at a comfortable rate. So ASUS ditched the speakers that flanked the 7in screen and placed in an 8.9in screen instead, with a good resolution of 1024x680. This is a MAJOR improvement over the little 800x480 screen, where you couldn't even have a spreadsheet over 4 columns.

Another issue was the hard drive that came with the Eee PC 700. It was only 4GB, of which 1.5GB was usable. Kinda pointless unless you had a portable hard drive. So, ASUS decided to release two versions of the 900, a 20GB one with the normal ASUS Xandros OS preloaded on it. The second one was a 16GB with Windows XP preloaded, and the latter's SSD space is less probably so they could put XP without having to raise the price of the Eee PC.

With the 700, there wasn't a good reason why you should've installed XP. XP was slow on the Eee PC, as it only had 512MB. Not anymore. The 900 has 1GB of DDR400 preinstalled. Brilliant.

ASUS has taken a leaf out of Apple's MacBook (hah, not funny) and decided to put a multi-touch trackpad which is a lot wider than the 700's trackpad. It's pretty good, pinching images to zoom in and out, and although it's nothing against the MacBook's trackpad, it's still pretty good...

The 0.3MP webcam that came with the 700 was about as good as the camera on a Sony Ericsson W200. ASUS decided to stick a 1.3MP camera for the people who actually bother to use Skype. Good idea...but I don't think many people actually bother with webcams.

Hell, even the bag that comes with the 900 is better, its this soft thing that's a lot better than the original 700's one.

Now with all this improvement, obviously something's got to give. That's the battery life. The battery life isn't any better than the 700's 3.5 hours. It's only 2.5 in the 900, which is probably because of the bigger screen size. Of course, you can always buy a bigger battery, but this will increase both the weight and the price. Luckily, the 900 comes with a power brick the size of a notebook mouse, so it should be relatively ok.

ASUS obviously is very daring to bring out something like this for just over $300 USD. Isn't ASUS a GENIUS?!